Reader Player One: 10 Biggest Changes From The Book

In simplifying the challenges so the gunters simply have to find three keys, and not the three gates that these keys fit, the movie dumps one major device from the novel: the flicksyncs.

The first of these pops up in the novel almost immediately after Wade wins at Joust and gets the Copper Key: on reaching the Copper Gate, he finds himself in the movie WarGames, required to give a word-perfect recreation of Matthew Broderick's role in order to advance.

Further such scenes follow; we're told they become popular in the OASIS following Parzival's first victory, and at the final gate he faces another in the form of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If handled correctly, the flicksyncs might have made for interesting viewing; but they might just as easily have tested the audience's patience, not to mention the challenge they clearly posed as regards film rights in a film already overstuffed with cameos and Easter Eggs from numerous different properties.

The solution they found was to instead utilise footage from a film to which studio Warner Bros already owned the rights: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Doubtless this was an attractive prospect to director Steven Spielberg, given he had been a friend of the late auteur.

While the task within The Shining is not a flicksync as such - the characters do not have to act out a pre-existing role - it does present a fun play on the concept, and makes for an entertaining sequence.